The kids wanted to make a box fort haunted house this year and so I got to work trying to figure out how to make one! It was the first time ...

Box Fort Haunted House for Halloween

The kids wanted to make a box fort haunted house this year and so I got to work trying to figure out how to make one! It was the first time I had made a multi-room box fort that used more than one or two boxes. It was definitely not a resounding success, but it's still mostly standing and was definitely a good learning exercise for me.


As I was taping the box flaps together, I realized that I should do something to help the box keep its shape. My solution was to use scraps of cardboard to make angled support pieces in the corners (you can see them in the top two corners). This strategy worked pretty well, but after a lot of pushing and pulling and squishing from the kids playing inside and crashing into it from the outside, the supports started to bend.

The first room was done! Our door had a fancy handle on the inside and outside, but it did have one flaw. I did not measure at all and the doorway was too narrow for me to fit through! So when I had to get inside to work on it I had to worm on my side which was...interesting...

2 rooms attached! First lesson learned, single boxes - even the really big ones - make for teeny tiny rooms. 

Since I learned from the first two rooms, I used two boxes to make a third larger room! As you can see, the kids had started decorating the first two rooms with spooky decorations!

The kids wanted a "second floor" so I put a small wooden table in the corner of the large room and built a lookout tower. 

The next big lesson I learned is that making a roof for your box fort is very difficult when the boxes are not all the same size and height. Oops.

All in all, for our first real box fort I think it came out really cool! I learned a lot and I am confident that I can renovate it, build it better, and turn it into something Christmassy - maybe a gingerbread house or Santa's workshop or the post office! 

0 comments:

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)